Twenty years after its National Football League teams left town, Los Angeles seems to have several opportunities to get a new one — or two. The St. Louis Rams, Oakland Raiders and San Diego Chargers all show interest in returning to the L...

On Tuesday, voters in Los Angeles will choose representatives in about half of the City Council, L.A. Unified school board and L.A. Community College Board districts. Also, they’ll approve or reject a pair of city charter amendments that ...

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Editorials

As Los Angeles voters seek the strongest possible leaders for their city, they must take a critical look not only at the office-holders seeking re-election but also at the challengers claiming they could do a better job. Before throwing the supposed bums out, voters should ask of the challengers: Do their positions on the issues represent something truly different? (It’s rare in L.A., where nearly all of the leading candidates are Democrats.) Do they offer convincing rationales...

Editorials

Can’t we just call them the diamond lanes, as Southern Californians did when sections of our freeways were first reserved for carpoolers back in the 1970s? No one, after all, calls them what Caltrans does: HOV lanes, for high-occupancy vehicles, which is a bureaucratic mouthful. Call them what we will, it’s fair to say motorists in these parts have a love-hate relationship with them. It can be undeniably sweet, those rare times you as a driver realize that...

Editorials

If the past is any indication, voter turnout for the Los Angeles City Council and school-board primary election on March 3 will be depressingly low. It almost certainly will be lower than two years ago when less than one-quarter of L.A.’s registered voters cast ballots for citywide as well as council offices. It’s a serious problem for a democratic system of government when so few citizens are participating in pivotal decisions. It also is a problem with no...

Editorials

A wave of legislation about to hit the California Legislature on the alarming pattern of over-drugging foster children will require careful navigating. But it’s heartening that lawmakers are anxious to deal with the problems described in heartbreaking detail over the past year by the Los Angeles News Group’s sister papers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Most encouraging is that new state Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León, D-Los Angeles, is on top of this.

|3 weeks ago

Editorials

Too many homicides handled by the Los Angeles Police Department were shelved without an arrest and the public never knew why because the LAPD wouldn’t say. To most, solving a homicide means a suspect faces justice. Not so for some in law enforcement, apparently, and that demands public scrutiny. The LAPD must clearly explain how nearly 12 percent of its...

Editorials

Even that self-consciously self-important jack-of-all-trades Charles Fletcher Lummis would have been surprised to know a century on from his time how important his legacy would be to Southern California. That it was a legacy he carefully crafted is somehow quintessentially Western. Like so many of us, though, he didn’t begin Western at all. He was a New Englander, a Harvard classmate of Teddy Roosevelt until he dropped out during his senior year. He was a drifter, heading...

Editorials

As voters in seven Los Angeles City Council districts prepare to choose their next representatives, the most extraordinary contest is in District 4. Fourteen candidates are on the March 3 primary election ballot, vying to succeed Councilman Tom LaBonge in the district that winds from Sherman Oaks in the San Fernando Valley over to the Griffith Park area and down to Hollywood and the Miracle Mile. And most of those are serious, credible contenders. Deciding whom to support is a pleasant...

Editorials

Historic preservation not only saves the best of our urban and suburban past for future generations — it has proven economic benefits including but by no means limited to saving some of the most affordable and interesting homes from our existing housing stock. That’s one reason so many Los Angeles County cities have in recent decades enacted preservation guidelines aimed at keeping houses, multi-family apartments and courtyards and commercial buildings erected over the...

|4 weeks ago

Editorials

Americans are considered adults when they reach their 18th birthdays. They can vote, go off to war, quit school if they like — all kinds of crazy things. But being an adult on paper is not the whole shooting match. Companies and governments have a sliding scale for many choices or privileges in life. You still can’t buy alcoholic beverages until you turn 21. Car-rental companies put tight restrictions on those under 25. But one thing you can do at 18 across most of...

|3 weeks, 4 days ago

Editorials

When Bob Hertzberg was plotting his return to the state capital last year, he said he hoped to use his second stint in Sacramento to lead smart conversations about California issues, even making his home a salon for policymakers and big thinkers. But on the first issue Hertzberg is pushing since the former Assembly speaker was elected to the Senate, there’s a danger the conversation will end before it really begins. The issue is tax reform. The problem is that the San...